Despite the common use of online calendar systems for storing reminders and creating contracts with others about meeting times and locations, a great deal of collaboration is based on opportunistic communication arranged under uncertainty. Such informal coordination often hinges on peoples' shared intuitions about current and future locations and activities of friends and colleagues. Even with the use of online group calendar systems, for example, people can be challenged with understanding how available others are for collaboration. Research on user modeling over the last decade has focused largely on applications that center on reasoning about a user's current activities, intentions, and goals. However, knowing a user's status does not necessarily aid future or desired collaboration between communicating parties.
In general, people seeking to communicate with others make decisions about best timing and channel of communication(s). They can select and execute a communication modality or set of modalities based on their own needs and preferences, as well as on their knowledge and intuitions about preferences and context of a person being contacted. However, attempts to communicate are often suboptimal for a contactor (e.g., sender, initiator . . . ) and a contactee (e.g., receiver, recipient . . . ). For example, attempts by a contactor to establish real-time telephony may interrupt the contactee at an inconvenient time for conversing, or frustrate the contactor with a voice message capture that may lead to costly delays for both the contactor and contactee. Contactees can employ multiple techniques to selectively filter incoming communications. Some people might employ well-trained assistants, while others rely on manual screening of incoming telephone calls, voice messages, and batches of email messages. However, limiting or deferring real-time communications to minimize disruptions and maximize privacy is only a piece of the challenge associated with communications management.
By way of example, conventional e-mail systems can be susceptible to communications and message coordination difficulties between parties. For example, a contactee may be situated in a remote region, wherein voice communications via telephone or other medium is not available. The contactee may have indicated to contactors (e.g., fellow workers, supervisors and loved ones) that e-mail provides the most reliable manner in which the contactee will receive a message. Although, conventional e-mail systems can indicate that a transmitted message has been received and opened by the contactee and can include a predetermined/pre-configured reply such as “On vacation for one week” or “Out of the office this afternoon,” there is currently no automatically generated indication provided to the contactor when and/or how long it will be before the contactee can respond. Thus, if an emergency were to occur or an important message needed to get through, contactors can only guess when the contactee will potentially receive the message and hope that the message is received and responded to in a timely manner. Similar difficulties arise when attempting to schedule meetings when it is difficult to ascertain whether a party can attend a meeting at some time.
As is common in everyday situations, messages are transmitted with varying degrees of urgency, importance, and priority. Often, key meetings need to be arranged at a moments notice in order to address important business or personal issues. Consequently, one or more messages can be directed to one or more parties to indicate the urgency of the meeting. In addition, messages are often communicated over multiple communications modalities in order to attempt to reach potential parties. For example, a business manager may send e-mails to key parties and follow the e-mail with phone calls, pages or faxes to the parties, wherein voice mails are typically left for non-answering parties. Unfortunately, the business manager is often unsure whether non-responding parties have received the messages and unable to determine with any degree of confidence when all parties may be available to meet.
Contactees also may wish to have richer channels or multiple channels of communication than the particular modality selected by a contacting party. For example, a contacting party may send email when the recipient would have much preferred real-time instant messaging or telephony. Someone working frantically on a document under a deadline may want editorial comments to come via real-time communications, even when they are away from their desktop, except in a few select settings, where they would like to receive an electronic message, coupled with a real-time alert about the attempted contact. Depending on the caller and situation, contactees can often desire to be reached in real time rather than be missed by a caller. With current ad hoc communications, it is common for users attempting to converse with one another to note frustration about nonconvergent attempts at communication.